Irene was nice to Garden Consultant HQ last week

As you are all aware, Tropical Storm Irene came a knockin' the other weekend. I won't lie and say that I wasn't wringing my hands over her. The weather geeks made it sound like she was the real deal...and for some people she was. We had minimal damage here at our place...we just lost a couple of big limbs in the back yard. We had a bunch of leaf litter and little branches all over the ground. It only took us one day to clean up after her...and it almost looked like nothing even happened here.

One decent sized limb out of the last of the junky red maples in the back yard. Eric really wanted to take that tree down but decided not to because he wasn't going to do the shed this season. That junky tree does provide us a lot of privacy from the deck off of the neighbor behind us.

The top of a sassafrass tree fell down into the back forty. There are a couple of limbs that got all broken and twisted up in another red maple back there. They haven't fallen, but I think I'm going to take the loppers to them with a ladder.

Lake Larson made it through the storm completely unscathed. I was really worried about this because of potential power loss. We only lost power for about 8 hours. Once again, we were lucky because there were hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders who didn't have power for days on end. Why power outages are bad for water gardens is the waterfalls which supply oxygen to the fish shut down. The fish can actually smother to death without waterfalls or air stones aerating the water. Thank goodness, that was a non issue. Eric has been toying with the idea of putting the waterfalls on solar panels on the garage roof. I think I may make a push for that, not only for the savings on the power bill but also so the waterfalls and wet pets aren't completely reliant on National Grid.

Probably the worst of the damage we sustained...our neighbor lost a good sized dead limb out of his oak and it squashed part of Agility Land's fence. Oh well...we straightened it out the best we could. It still does the job of keeping Lars from saying hi to the neighbor and his little boy.

Again, we were lucky. We saw this on our ride back from the marina to check on Eric's boat and to grab his power inverter. That puts things into perspective doesn't it.